Instruments on board the NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental
Satellite (POES) continually monitor the energy of the protons and
electrons that produce aurora in the atmosphere. The Space
Environment Center (SEC) has developed a technique that uses
the observations obtained during a single pass of the satellite
over a polar region (which takes about 25 minutes) to estimate the
total power deposited in an entire polar region by these auroral
particles. For more information on these measurement, see SEC's
POES Auroral Activity
page.